Animals Are What They Eat

Animals raised in factory farms eat diets designed to fatten them quickly and inexpensively. Factory meat at the supermarket costs half what it did in the 1960s and now Americans are used to cheap food. Instead of using meat as a flavoring or special occasion meal, it is now eaten sometimes at three meals a day because it is so affordable.

I wrote previously about cattle material prohibited in animal feed (CMPAF), which means only parts of “high risk” (diseased) dead cattle cannot be used in animal feed (to help prevent mad cow disease). But note that CMPAF can still be used for food fertilizer, composted, or buried. There are no requirements for review of facilities or established frequency of reviews – all of the responsibility is left to the slaughterhouses. Cattle not inspected can still be used, and high-risk cattle do not need to be separated from the other cattle.^[1]

Now I’ve combined resources to come up with a list of what actually can still be fed to animals. The main ingredients in animal feed are genetically modified (GMO) corn and GMO soy that are kept at artificially low prices by government subsidies. To further cut costs, factory animal feed may also contain “by-product feedstuff” including:

• Animal by-products (parts of a slaughtered animal that are not directly consumed by humans) – for example, meat and bone meal. This includes fat, gelatin, blood, and offal (internal organs and entrails).
• Chicken feather meal, fat, and chicken litter/dried manure, eggs and hatchery
• Alfalfa cubes, barley silage, dried cattle manure, coffee grounds, corn and cob meal, solvents, oat straw, potato waste, wheat, stale pastry, and candy.
• Ammonium sulfate (from fertilizer), antibiotics, and any pesticides or herbicides used in the corn and soybean fields.
• Restaurant grease, municipal garbage, and sewage sludge
• Rendered (boiled) ingredients (unfit for human consumption) – for example hair, hoof, beak, neck, bone, blood, eyeballs, entire carcasses from diseased and disabled animals, including millions of euthanized cats and dogs, including the pentobarbital (euthanasia drugs).
• Slaughterhouse byproducts from cows cannot be fed back to cows, but can be used in chicken feed – then the chicken meal can be fed back to cows. ^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

Sometimes factory animals are fed infected feed which can cause diseases like salmonella, swine fever, and foot and mouth disease. Meat tastes great but you are what you eat just like animals are what they eat. Fixing the factory animal feed problem is a two-step process. First, we eat less meat to decrease the demand on cheap meat and help us be able to afford higher quality food. Second, we buy meat from local farmers we know who let us visit their farms. Farmers who love their animals will explain how they feed and protect their animals so that they, and in turn we, are not fed garbage.